Watchtowers on a high-security facility near what is believed to be a re-education camp where mostly Muslim ethnic minorities are detained, on the outskirts of Hotan, in China's northwestern Xinjiang region. File photo/AFP
AFP
ON THE WEB, 15 December 2020
International Criminal Court prosecutors have rejected calls by exiled Uyghurs to investigate China for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity, the chief prosecutor’s office said in a report on Monday.
The Uyghurs handed a huge dossier of evidence to the court in July accusing China of locking more than one million Uyghurs and other mostly Muslim minorities in re-education camps and of forcibly sterilising women.
But the office of prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said it was unable to act because the alleged acts happened on the territory of China, which is not a signatory to The Hague-based ICC.
In its annual report Bensouda’s office said “this precondition for the exercise of the court’s territorial jurisdiction did not appear to be met with respect to the majority of the crimes alleged.”
There was also “no basis to proceed at this time” on separate claims of forced deportations of Uyghurs back to China from Tajikistan and Cambodia, the ICC report said.
The Uyghurs had argued that even though the alleged deportations did not happen on Chinese soil, the ICC could act because they happened on Tajik and Cambodian territory, and both of them are ICC members.
Lawyers for the Uyghurs had now asked the court to reconsider “on the basis of new facts or evidence”, the ICC prosecutor’s report said.
China has called the accusations baseless and says the facilities in the northwestern Xinjiang region are job training centres aimed at steering people away from terrorism.
The ICC has no obligation to consider complaints filed to the prosecutor, who can decide independently what cases to submit to judges at the court, set up in 2002 to achieve justice for the world’s worst crimes.
There must be a way for countries under foreign occupation like Tibet, East Turkistan, Southern Mongolia and Hong Kong to make legitimate grievances against rogue regimes like communist China of gross violation of their rights, genocide, ethnocide and mass incarceration of innocent people.
If the goal of the ICC is to bring to justice the perpetrators of gross human rights violation and genocide, it cannot be selective by choosing soft targets like African countries and Balkan nations while turning a blind eye to bully’s like China.
That will delegitimise its very existence and will be seen for what it is — an Organization that is making a living out of the miseries of the war torn poor countries while similar atrocities committed by regimes with money power and clout are shoved under the carpet as of no consequence.
Such brazen disregard for the plight of the down trodden people of Tibet and East Turkistan only diminishes the sanctity, legitimacy and the avowed goal of the ICC. It MUST make amends to consider the cries of the weak people under occupation and genocidal assimilation such as Tibet and East Turkistan .
Just like the eye of a rich man and the eye of a poor man are same, the sufferings of the Tibetans and the East Turkistan people are same as the suffering of any other human being. You can’t treat one is legitimate while ignoring the other. This is gross discrimination, pure and simple!
WAKE UP ICC!!!
It’s like women goes to police station for lodging rape complaint, which again is headed by the same person who raped her. UN is headed by China and so is ICJ entry committee for admittance of cases before it.